I imagine that if you really looked, you'd find Mayflower descendants "very thick upon the ground" in the US. Perhaps they have a higher status if they have stayed close to home, and can thus impress those of more recent immigrant stock. They are there to say there is a there there. Otherwise, it's just miserable old New England.

Thus, the author quotes a local who is descended from the captain, as though there is some tradition of knowledge of the man, handed down for 12-13 generations. Perhaps there is. But we are mostly equals in that we must find out what our ancestors thought not by oral tradition, but from letters, diaries, etc.

When I grew up, my father told us we came over on the Half Moon. I don't know if this was true. Subsequent research proves to the best ability that we have, that we are descended from the earliest English settlers of Long Island and also from the earliest of the Dutch in New Amsterdam. Perhaps that is why I never heard from my Brooklyn-born Dad that we were also Mayflower descendants, by way of his Boston-born grandmother (who later retired to the South Shore after having lived in New York). Perhaps the Yankee- Red Sox rivalry is really much older than those teams. But William Brewster and someone named More are among our thousands of ancestors from that age.

I'm sort of glad I didn't know that when we went last summer (2008) to Plimoth Plantation for the first time. I enjoyed hanging out with the Indians, and I am glad that at the time, I had nothing to hide or be proud about. It was chill. And then I consider the nieces and nephews of ancestor Benoni Stebbins of Deerfield - they were kidnapped by French, but they stayed with the Indians (not unlike a recent abduction). Was it just Stockholm Syndrome or did the Indians actually live better than the Puritans, not, for instance, beating their children or hanging people as witches. Hm.

David Lindsay is a descendent of Richard More, who, as a five-year-old child, was a passenger on the Mayflower's historic trip to America. Richard, however was a Stranger, i.e., not one of the pilgrims, but one of a family of four children banished by their mother's husband. Richard was the only sibling to survive the first year, and would live into his eighties, witnessing a great deal of history, including the Salem Witchcraft trials.

Although Richard is not really a famous person, biographies of lesser-known figures like this can be fascinating insights into the time. In working with a limited set of facts, has the opportunity to recreate the era. Unfortunately, Lindsay is so determined to find significance, symbolism, suspense and portentous meaning, that he overwhelms his story with convolutions. These begin with a conceit that his audience is a seventeenth century person partially responsible for More's excommunication and self-reproof for laying bare the facts of Richard More's life. Well, there was an easy solution for the latter.

Still, if the style is disappointing, there are still plenty of details of life first in England and then in the American colonies that round out the picture gleaned from more conventional histories. ( )